Industry spends approximately $1200 per employee per year on training (in 2014). Various methods of training include in person presentations, consulting, webinars, books, c.d.'s and pamphlets. An outside presenter or creator of material or seller will generally sell this to a company's Human Resources Department which generally handles employee training, or to a particular department such as Sales, Safety & Security, Production and so forth, concerned with the topic covered.
A great inefficiency was discovered in this system and this led to the invention of the present method. The method of the present invention is based on identifying an intermediary provider of services to the categories of end-user businesses which constitute the appropriate target audiences for the materials and utilizing existing technologies of web-hosted, password protected synchronous and asynchronous access of materials converted to SCORM and Experience API packages for use in LMS (Learning Management Systems) for subscribers. As such the present invention advances the commercial interaction with computer based technologies, in this case for paid educational purposes and training.
Accordingly, for training on safety, security, and loss prevention and all areas of loss at businesses, organizations and agencies related to reducing worker's comp claims, public liability claims, external and internal theft, sickness at the workplace, defusing of violent confrontations at the workplace, and related topics, the first step of this method is to provide materials on a subscription basis to the several dozen largest security integrators in the world or to the largest human resource and payroll service outsourcers and providers. Security integrators have sought to expand the range of their services from simple security to communications such as nursing station to doctor, work dock to administration office, and field offices to internal offices as well as emergency announcement systems, telephone systems and all forms of data integration. Further such companies may concern themselves with building automation, access control, guard and safety-escort services, cyber security and personal safety and emergency response systems.
Since integrators wish to provide a total experience for their clients and be viewed as valuable partners, the integration of an array of valuable training which these integrators may conduct to their clients fits their agenda. Human resource outsourcer companies such as ADP, Paychex and Insperity also broaden their services provided such as payroll and employee benefit services to include providing educational employee training materials to their clients. The skills of such integrators and outsourcers to develop and produce top quality educational material on their own however is very limited and an examination of many things offered reveals a complete absence of anything of high production value quality or dramatic arts. Instead, dry, jargon-laden dreary webisodes, webinars, whitepapers and Power Point presentations prevail.
In the case of the security integrators such offered educational materials would pertain to loss prevention. In the case of the human resources outsources such materials would pertain to loss prevention and may also relate to sales training, customer service and employee communications skills.
In VEHOVSKY, et. Al. US 2014/0057239 (hereinafter “Vehovsky”) there is shown a method of putting training materials in a website hosted site where such content is selectable by users from a queue. This did not anticipate the use of security integrators, payroll or human resource outsourcers or other providers, whose primary business was not the selling or distribution of such materials, as distributors of the materials for a producer or seller of the materials. The object in Vehovsky essentially teaches away from the present invention insofar as it makes a wide array of materials available to a wide array of individual users or buyers or learners selecting from a queue of materials, as opposed to greatly centralizing the distribution of sold materials in a vertically integrated way in the present invention, which is the opposite. The model in Vehovsky is similar to that in stock photograph websites such as Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStock, and Dreamstime where a great number of photographers upload content for purchase and a great number of individual customers select, pay for and download images. Secondly the essential element of the present invention, which is that the training materials are tangentially related to the primary business of the distributor such as a payroll service or security integrator and not a core part of those businesses, is lacking or taught away from in Vehovsky. It is worth examining and exploring Vehovsky as a typical instance of prior art in order to best see by contrast the vast acceleration of sales possible in the present invention.
In CHEN, et. al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,249,281 (hereinafter “Chen”) a GUI (graphical user interface) is presented which allows users or learners to interact with content via icons or graphical images instead of text based commands. Although this speaks to an element of interaction which is in the present invention in a different form, namely survey, feedback or polling questions could be presented with GUI's, the essential element of providing training in a web hosted, credentialed access system that is SCORM and Experience API conformant to work with LMS's (Learning Management Systems) and the provision of this through what is termed in the present invention the tangential distribution method related to sales through a very large integrator or provider of services only tangentially related to the subject of the content is nowhere considered or anticipated in Chen. Again, it is useful to explore Chen as a typical instance of the growing use of interaction in web based learning, however as a sales method the essential invention of the present invention is not part of Chen in the same way it is lacking from any other prior art or extant methods.